Whatever you do, don't eat the daisies

Having a celebrity or a prestigious venue as a client can be a wonderful magnet for other customers and Russell Longmuir is lucky enough to have quite a few.

His latest transaction, with the Groucho Club, merely added the famous Soho private members club to an impressive client list.

In the UK, Longmuir's Cameron-Shaw "floral architecture" business already carries out work for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Knightsbridge and celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay.

Overseas, it has installed artificial and dried flowers at the Addis Ababa Sheraton Hotel in Ethiopia and sent artificial trees to a customer in Uganda.

However, Longmuir still ranks the Groucho Club deal as the best transaction in his time running Cameron-Shaw's shop based in New Kings Road in London's Parsons Green.

"I set up the shop 14 years ago with my sister and then bought her out a couple of years later," recalls Longmuir, 40.

"We started off just selling dried flowers. Now we also do silk and latex flowers and displays. We do it in our own style and have worked for all the top interior designers at home and abroad.

"Nothing we do here is with real, living flowers. We range from traditional dried flowers to sculptures and highly individualistic designs.

"But the big growth area for us is replica trees and plants, whether they are for exterior pots and window boxes or for inside offices, clubs and hotels. A lot of big companies are finding that it saves them a lot of time and effort maintaining real plants.

"You only have to drive around London to find a number of dead window boxes and trellises that nobody has looked after."

For the Groucho Club, Cameron-Shaw recently supplied six artificial Cypress Bonsai trees that form a new permanent display outside the venue.

"You would never know that they are fake," says Longmuir, who got the initial business lead for the Groucho Club connection from flower display designer Camilla Astor.

"A friend of hers has opened up a shop near us," he says. "She passed by, saw what we were doing and said it was something that the Groucho Club might be interested in. "We arranged a meeting with the general manager of the club, who turned out to be someone we had done a lot of business with 10 years ago. "For us this deal was very significant. It was important for the genre that somewhere like the Groucho Club, a long-established and prestigious venue, has taken fake trees. It was quite a coup for us."

Longmuir believes the fact that the Groucho Club has endorsed Cameron-Hall's products demonstrates their quality.

"Artificial trees like these for exterior use have only been around for a year or so," he says.

"The quality has become very good. Previously, they would not last that long. Now they are quite amazing. We think they will become more and more frequent sights at major offices, hotels and clubs."Longmuir says Cameron-Shaw supplies artificial plants to Coutts, the aristocratic private bank in the Strand, and is increasingly supplying its artificial foliage to City banks and investment companies, sourcing many of the products in the Far East.

"A lot of companies are now finding the benefits of quality silk flowers," he says.

"When we started using them, the general reaction was 'silk flowers, yuck!' People could not envisage them but when they saw them, they really liked them. They feel just like real flowers when you touch them. The quality is just getting better and better.

"There are so many companies that provide fresh flowers and foliage for their premises. They can save a fortune by switching to artificial ones and they can change them around every six months or so to freshen things up."

Cameron-Shaw's plans for the future include opening a studio and an e-commerce website enabling customers to buy its products via the internet.

"What we do is very individual," says Longmuir. "It is not mass market at the moment but we are developing lines that will be. We are going to serve the mass market from our website." Not that Cameron-Shaw intends to forget its more up-market customers, of course. Indeed Longmuir has been in further discussions with his latest celebrity venue.

"Quite a lot of other things are now in the pipeline with the Groucho Club," he smiles.